Eye Piece

  • Movie News

The Northman DP Jarin Blaschke on Staging the ‘Land of the Rus’ Battle Sequence

Early in The Northman, a team of elite warriors, which co-writer Sjón describes as “like a SEAL team,” raid a…

2 years ago
  • Movie News

Power of the Dog Cinematographer Ari Wegner on the Daily Storyboarding Max ‘Before Your Brain Melts Down’

Cinematographer Ari Wegner needed a detailed spreadsheet of all the sightlines in The Power of the Dog, because the shoot…

2 years ago
  • Movie News

How The Girlfriend Experience Used Deepfake Technology for Its Season 3 Finale

(Spoiler alert: The following contains details about The Girlfriend Experience Season 3 finale, which aired Sunday on Starz.) Zachary Galler…

3 years ago
  • Movie News

Undine: Shooting the Underwater Sequences of the Modern Fairy Tale

Undine, the latest film from Christian Petzold, is set in the present — but tells a story that feels firmly…

3 years ago
  • Archives
  • Interviews
  • Movie News

The Underground Railroad Director Barry Jenkins Talks With DP James Laxton: ‘This Is the Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done’

Cinematographer James Laxton remembers his first collaborations with director Barry Jenkins at Florida State University’s film program almost two decades…

3 years ago
  • Movie News

How Pieces of a Woman Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb Staged the Devastating 24-Minute Single-Take Birth Scene

Pieces of a Woman stars Vanessa Kirby, Shia LaBeouf, and Ellen Burstyn as a family torn apart by grief. This…

3 years ago
  • Eye Piece

Eye Piece: DP Yorick Le Saux Mixed Digital With 35MM and Heavy Prep With On-Set Improvisation To Shoot High Life

Filming High Life marked my first feature collaboration with writer-director Claire Denis. Part survival story and part erotic science-fiction, the film’s…

5 years ago
  • Winter 2019

Eye Piece: Spherical Lenses and Calculated Color Choices Allowed the Visuals of Birds of Passage to Take Flight

Depicting the ancestral culture of the Wayuu—a Native American group indigenous to northern Colombia—and shedding light on their complex relationship with death and dreams, directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro…

5 years ago
  • Eye Piece

Eye Piece: How Mandy DP Benjamin Loeb Custom-Lit a Quarry, Custom-Fit a Chemistry Lab Set, and Shot a Chainsaw Fight and an Actual Tiger

I knew that jumping into the warped mind of director Panos Cosmatos to make Mandy was going to be an…

6 years ago
  • Eye Piece

Eye Piece: Porto Used the “Lightest, Most Liberating” Film Cameras to Shoot Its Handheld and Long-Lens Scenes

Porto is a love letter to the timelessness of great cinema. Director Gabe Klinger is a scholar of cinema history,…

6 years ago
  • Cinematography

Eye Piece: Mirrors, Neon Signs and Other Lighting Tricks Create Disorientation in DP Peter Flinckenberg’s Woodshock

I was not familiar with Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s impressive career in fashion, but from the first minutes of our…

7 years ago
  • Moviemaking

Eye Piece: DP Roman Vasyanov (Suicide Squad) on Shooting Doug Liman’s Sniper Thriller The Wall on Super-16

The shooting schedule for Doug Liman’s sniper-centered thriller The Wall was very short—14 days—and the location and conditions were not…

7 years ago
  • Winter 2017

Light My Fire: Free Fire’s DP on How Comprehensive Lighting Let Ben Wheatley’s Shoot-Out Flick Go Full Throttle

Free Fire marks the sixth project I’ve shot with writer-director Ben Wheatley. Our story is set in 1978 Boston, so…

7 years ago
  • Eye Piece
  • Moviemaking

Eye Piece: How DP Daniella Nowitz of Live Cargo Captured a Surreal Bahamas in Black and White

Producer Thymaya Payne, during an initial phone call about our film Live Cargo, cut to the chase: “We’re shooting on…

7 years ago
  • Cinematography

Eye Piece: Dark Night Used Streetlights and Neon Signs to Give Natural Darkness a Haunting Glow

We shot Dark Night in June of 2015, in Sarasota, Florida: It was very hot and right in the middle of…

7 years ago
  • Fall 2016

Eye Piece: Moonlight DP James Laxton Illuminates Miami’s Bold, Blue, Beautiful Darkness

Following the life of Chiron, a young man coming of age in Miami during the “War on Drugs,” Moonlight is…

8 years ago
  • Summer 2016

Eye Piece: How Dystopian Romance Equals Was Lit Entirely by Luminescent LEDs

As a cinematographer, I have made several movies with director Drake Doremus, including Like Crazy and Breathe In. Those films…

8 years ago
  • How They Did It

Eye Piece: How I Trained Astronauts to Shoot the Stunning 4K Footage in A Beautiful Planet from Space

A Beautiful Planet is the seventh IMAX film shot in space by astronauts, and continues a three-decade long association with…

8 years ago
  • Spring 2016

Lurid Account: Luca Guadagnino on the Cinematography in A Bigger Splash

When I told StudioCanal that I was going to remake Jacques Deray’s 1969 La Piscine, I said, “I’m going to…

8 years ago
  • Cinematography
  • Eye Piece
  • Winter 2016

Eye Piece: Colombian Stunner Embrace of the Serpent Renders the Amazon in Ghostly Silver

When director Ciro Guerra and producer Cristina Gallego gave me the script for Embrace of the Serpent, I took my…

8 years ago
  • Cinematography
  • Eye Piece

Eye Piece: How Sarah Adina Smith Shot Three Visual Styles in Midnight Swim

For any filmmaker, switching genres between movies is a tough task. But Sarah Adina Smith decided to switch between genres…

9 years ago
  • Cinematography
  • Inside MM - Directing
  • Summer 2015

Sight, Sound and Fury: The Tribe Gives New Meaning to “Must-See”

“Like magic.” That’s how Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy describes the intricate, lightning-quick articulations of sign language. It’s also a fitting…

9 years ago